The phrase ‘necessary but evil‘ does not describe it for me. For starters, I wholeheartedly believe Klout is not evil, nor do I believe it is necessary. I do, though, think it is an important, early tool for understanding ourselves. Further, I believe it is not only useful for companies seeking the citizen influencer/evangelist, but also for those citizens, themselves. It is in the public domain, so I am not giving any secrets away, but the complexity of the Klout algorithm is impressive; As many know, it was just updated earlier this month and has 400 or so inputs, or signals. So long as people do not freak out over their own scores, I think they can learn a lot about their personas.. I am anxious to see what we (the industry) will be able to do in terms of aligning online and offline behaviors of unified users, and then predicting what they will do next.